Support teams have a hard job. As people deal with more brands across various devices, the pace of business continues to quicken. Products are at our fingertips 24/7 and so we expect customer support to be at our fingertips 24/7. Unsurprisingly, this level of service often fails to materialize—partly because expectations are set so high. To compete in a crowded economy, businesses promise more, but it can be difficult to deliver that level of service consistently and at scale.

Instead of asking “How can my support team keep up?” consider a different question: “What are the most important situations in our customers’ journey around which our support team can design proactive engagement and support?” This requires a mindset shift for customer support. Instead of reacting to solve customer problems and fighting an endless battle to tame the tickets, this growth mindset frees support teams to design support based on what you know customers are going to need at each point in their journey.

At Zendesk, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of tool could help support teams get in front of customer issues so that customer satisfaction never dips in the first place. We designed Connect to help you stop playing catch-up and start offering proactive engagement that answers questions before customers file tickets. With proactive support, your mountain of tickets signals an opportunity to intervene proactively to solve customer problems earlier—and your company can begin to view support as a partner to improve the overall customer experience and grow the business.

Shifting the support mindset

It’s time we shift the support mindset from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. With Connect, support teams can orchestrate and scale satisfying customer experiences throughout the customer journey in three ways:

1. Anticipate and prevent tickets

Solve problems before they arise; send messages in real-time via any channel based on what your customers are doing within your product. Using their customer journey data and Zendesk Support, you can decide to send an automated message or get an agent involved, if necessary. By anticipating and acting on customer needs, you’re saving agents unnecessary headaches and allowing time to think about ways to drive revenue, deepen engagement, and build trust with customers.

2. Follow up at scale

It’s nice to let your customers know you care about them and that you’re thinking about them. Level up your support by following up with customers after they make a purchase, browse your web page, or leave a review. Scale by using the entire support history for any user—including tickets, tags, and satisfaction ratings —to personalize automated responses on the channels your customers want to be reached on.

3. Grow and Retain

Design proactive communication and keep your customers coming back. Test and experiment on which types of proactive engagement have a higher response rate. Then use those results to send personalized offers across email, mobile push, SMS, and website messages based on a customer’s support history and product journey. By measuring what customers do after they receive a message, like if they file a support ticket or convert, you can improve future communication. If you’re looking for more ways to grow your business with support, here are 6 ways to get proactive with your engagement.

Connect unites traditional customer service channels, including tickets, chats and phone calls with marketing automation channels like email, mobile and website messages, allowing support and marketing teams to improve communication throughout the customer journey. With Connect, you can run experiments that show when to problem-solve and when to market; when to send a message and when to hold back; when to automate and when to add a human touch.